The Voice of the City: Further Stories of the Four Million eBook

Again I repaired to the park and sat in the moon shade.
I thought and thought, and wondered why none could
tell me what I asked for.

And then, as swift as light from a fixed star, the
answer came to me. I arose and hurried—­hurried
as so many reasoners must, back around my circle.
I knew the answer and I hugged it in my breast as I
flew, fearing lest some one would stop me and demand
my secret.

Aurelia was still on the stoop. The moon was
higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat
at her side and we watched a little cloud tilt at
the drifting moon and go asunder quite pale and discomfited.

And then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights!
our hands somehow touched, and our fingers closed
together and did not part.

After half an hour Aurelia said, with that smile of
hers:

“Do you know, you haven’t spoken a word
since you came back!”

“That,” said I, nodding wisely, “is
the Voice of the City.”

II

THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full
flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and
war. The justness of this reflection commends
it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The
three conditions embrace about all there is in life
worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that
wealth should be added to the list. Not so.
When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar
that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining,
he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet
than any millionaire can hope to cast.

It seems that the wise executive power that rules
life has thought best to drill man in these three
conditions; and none may escape all three. In
rural places the terms do not mean so much. Poverty
is less pinching; love is temperate; war shrinks to
contests about boundary lines and the neighbors’
hens. It is in the cities that our epigram gains
in truth and vigor; and it has remained for one John
Hopkins to crowd the experience into a rather small
space of time.

The Hopkins flat was like a thousand others.
There was a rubber plant in one window; a flea-bitten
terrier sat in the other, wondering when he was to
have his day.

John Hopkins was like a thousand others. He worked
at $20 per week in a nine-story, red-brick building
at either Insurance, Buckle’s Hoisting Engines,
Chiropody, Loans, Pulleys, Boas Renovated, Waltz Guaranteed
in Five Lessons, or Artificial Limbs. It is not
for us to wring Mr. Hopkins’s avocation from
these outward signs that be.

Mrs. Hopkins was like a thousand others. The
auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sunday
afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen
store for home-made comforts, the furor for department
store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority
to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine
ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the
mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued
to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the
instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics
of the dumb-waiter shaft—­all the attributes
of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers.